Star with a giant ‘alien megastructure’ built around it is fading away… and nobody knows why

NASA astronomers can’t understand why the light from a star appears to be FADING… and they have no idea why.

Baffled researchers from the Carnegie and California Institutes of Technology are set to publish a paper on the bizarre phenomenon. They claim that “no known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve”.

The star is visible in the Northern hemisphere, beyond the Milky Way constellation

The paper’s authors, Benjamin Montet and Joshua Simon, told reporters they “spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real”.

“We just weren’t able to”.

The star, named KIC 8462852, was first studied in 2009 when scientists observed it with the Kepler Space Telescope. Their findings, and the solar object’s inexplicable rate of dimming, appear to defy all rational explanations.

Over the course of the initial study, the star’s shine dipped at intervals by up to as much as 20%. A normal rate of dimming, caused by a comet or small solar object passing between the star and the telescope, is around 1%.

Further analysis revealed that over the course of the previous century, the star’s light had gradually dimmed by over 15%.

Montet and Simon looked at the data from the Kepler telescope again, and found that towards the end of the study, the star’s light began to fade at an even faster rate, prompting them to submit the paper.

The mysterious orb, also known as “Tabby’s Star,” after it’s discover, Yale post-doctorate Tabetha Boyajian has been gradually getting even darker – over the last four years.

The suggestion that the flickering light being emitted could come from alien’s building a super-structure on the sphere’s surface was first made by Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University.

“I was fascinated by how crazy (the data) looked,” Wright told journalists in 2015.